


Five Times Castiel Gave Up (And One Time He Didn't)

by triedunture



Category: Supernatural
Genre: M/M, preslash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-05-09
Updated: 2011-05-09
Packaged: 2017-10-19 06:11:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,571
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/197811
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/triedunture/pseuds/triedunture





	Five Times Castiel Gave Up (And One Time He Didn't)

_**Supernatural fic: Five Times Castiel Gave Up (And One Time He Didn't)**_  
Title: Five Times Castiel Gave Up (And One Time He Didn't)  
Rating: PG  
Warnings: some mentions of violence  
Pairings: Dean/Cas preslash  
Length: 1500

  


1.

Angels, even those cast out from heaven, do not need to sleep. But there is waiting (a lot of waiting) involved in moving about the earth. People are sometimes in bed and cannot talk about what they've seen or heard, places of business are sometimes closed and cannot be investigated. The search for God must sometimes wait.

Castiel has become inured to this waiting. At first he would just stay where he was, quietly still. But even that has become dangerous, for even the quiet and the still can be found by the armies of both heaven and hell.

It is Sam who tells Cas that maybe, when he's on his own, he should perhaps consider using this downtime (Sam's word, not his) to blend into humanity and check into a motel.

The beds are covered in scratchy fabric and Castiel does not find the pattern or color of the wallpaper at all pleasing, but it looks very much like the rooms the Winchester brothers use, and that is sufficiently normal, Cas thinks.

He could sit or stand, quietly still, until dawn but, because there is nothing better to do, he decides to try laying prone. This is something humans do much of the time, and Cas was starting to wonder if it held some secret comfort for them that perhaps he could attempt to enjoy.

The bedclothes smell of cigarettes.

Cas lay there, hands folded neatly on his chest like an avatar atop a crypt, and closed his eyes. Nothing happened, and nothing changed. He gave it another hour until, feeling no different than he had at the start of the night, he gave up and called Dean on his mobile device to see if they were ready to meet.

2.

The tiny iron idol hangs on a black cord and looks very much like any other trinket available for purchase at a shop that stocks men's accessories and cologne. When Cas sees it looped around Dean Winchester's neck for the first time, things begin to click into place like boats slotting into a harbor. The necklace looks normal to humans, but Castiel sees it glinting softly against the dark cotton shirt, imbued with the power to find the most elusive being in the universe.

Of course it would be there, passed from hand to hand in the Winchesters' strange little family. Of course.

When Dean begrudgingly allows Cas to borrow it, he makes Cas promise he won't lose it. The angel takes this promise very seriously, fastening the cord around his own neck and hiding the precious artifact under the white collared shirt his vessel wears. He feels it there against his borrowed skin, hard and cold like a rare coin.

He wanders the globe, standing sometimes on the banks of the Red Sea, sometimes in the middle of a field in Oklahoma. He is often with the brothers he so fiercely wants to protect. When he's not, he is watching and listening and praying that the talisman under his shirt will begin to warm.

When alone, he sometimes draws the necklace out from beneath his shirt and holds the icon in his hands and thinks of its true owner and what he might be doing. He misses the ability to sense Dean where ever he may be, to think of him and see him sleeping, or eating, or driving, or speaking to a witness. Now when he wonders about Dean and his own protective spell blocks his holy sight, his hand searches out that necklace. His fingers cling to it as if they can rub holy heat into it and the search will be over.

After a few weeks of this, Cas looks down at the necklace in his hand and decides this is becoming a dangerous habit. The talisman is slipped into his pocket. And there it stays.

3.

After Famine has forced him full of raw ground meat, Castiel accepts Sam Winchester's kind offer of a toothbrush and toothpaste. Though he suspects that the suggestion that he brush his teeth was more for the Winchesters' comfort than his own; whenever he spoke, Dean especially would crinkle his nose.

Castiel cannot help that he never had to worry about dog food breath before.

He uses the implements of hygiene and then finds himself looking in the motel's bathroom mirror. His vessel's chin is covered in stubble, and he's allowed Jimmy Novak's lips to become dry and cracked.

Cas examines the other bottles and tubes on the bathroom sink. One smells, when he opens the cap, exactly like Sam Winchester's jaw.

He wonders if he should not stop at maintaining his teeth, if perhaps he should perform some measure of upkeep on this body that has already seen him through so much, and will hopefully see him through much besides.

But faced with all the creams, the cleansers, the razors and the medicinal scents, Cas can only replace the cap on the toothpaste and leave the bathroom for good.

4.  
Television. He tries, he really does, for 3 minutes and 32 seconds. And that's the best he can do before pressing the Power button on the scratched motel remote and turning his attention to the dust-streaked window, which he finds offers infinitely more entertaining views. A bird wings by across the parking lot, and Cas watches.

5.

Before the flood, there were some angels who, it was said, were charmed by the beauty of the daughters of man. Their offspring were the giants, the warriors, the heroes of the human race. Castiel has always considered this tale a cautionary one: don't impregnate the humans or else you might have something stronger and more violent to contend with.

Is it any wonder, then, why he'd never dared put himself in this situation?

The woman writhing on his thighs was, he hoped, not immediately fertile. The human race (bless them) had these pills now, though Castiel wondered about their effectiveness against the essence of heaven.

She is slick with oily sweat and has a very unsightly blemish on one shoulder. What would possess Dean to bring him to this place? Surely this was the worst of all possible last nights on earth.

"You need to relax," the woman shouts to be heard over the pounding music. Cas feels his spine stiffen at the order.

"This won't work," he mutters to himself. His hands are still on her gyrating hips where she placed them, slipping in the baby oil and cocoa butter.

"What'd you say, baby?" Again, shouted.

Castiel considers a swift, albeit possibly cruel, escape from this awful charade and takes it without a second thought.

  
[And one time he didn't.]

Dean Winchester is fresh from hell. His skin has been flayed and stitched back onto his form, his dark hair singed and smelling of acrid human, the whites of his eyes the only untouched part of his bruised face. There is blood (other's blood) under his fingernails and coating his arms up to his elbows.

Castiel reaches his side and gazes upwards, searching for the pinpoint of light that marks his exit out of hell. It's a jumble of tortured souls and demons writhing amidst all the layers of this stinking place, closing in to swallow the path to safety. His brothers, his soldiers, are falling right and left. Still, Castiel holds fast to the broken soul of Dean Winchester.

"Let go of me," he cries (not shouts, not screams, but actually cries, tears making tracks through the blood and the grime on his cheeks). "Just let go."

"I am to raise you up," Cas tells him. It is meant to be reassuring, the roar of his angelic voice and the blinding light of his true form. But Dean Winchester fights him, pushes him away.

"Leave me here," he says. "Leave me where I belong!"

The path is disappearing. They must take flight now or be forever engulfed by hell's fire. Flames lick at Castiel's wings, and he tells this boy, this Man Who Fell, the one who damned them all: "I am the Angel of the Fifth Day, and I am not leaving without you."

Dean Winchester will not remember this. Castiel will not allow him to. The only memory of this moment is within his own mind; there are no other survivors from heaven. His hand splayed across a broken shoulder, a terrible howl wrenched from a human soul, a battle flown through like knives. The strange mission ended on the plane between the worlds, and he held what was left of Dean Winchester's soul in his hands, where it trembled and quaked and still, still begged to be tossed back down into the Pit.

"I--I don't belong here." His eyes rolled wild in his head, seeking substance and finding none in this place.

Castiel spared a thought to his brothers who had died to save this creature, and he wondered if perhaps the human was right. Perhaps this entire mission was--

No. Castiel shook his head.

"Doubt not," he said softly. "I am here with you, and I am not about to give you up." And he slowly, carefully, began reassembling the soul and body of Dean Winchester.

  


>   
> 


End file.
